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Submitted: June 2, 2009 - 9:10pm
Originally published: June 2, 2009
Last updated: June 2, 2009 - 9:11pm
Originally published: June 2, 2009
Last updated: June 2, 2009 - 9:11pm
Source:
App-Rising.com
Author:
Geoff Daily
[Commentary] While data zips across the country on beams of light carried by fiber optic cables, when it reaches the vast majority of last-mile access networks it hits copper wires, which regardless of whether it's DSL or cable will always be slower than fiber. The more fiber you have the more capacity that's available to handle Internet traffic. And when you lay fiber all the way to users' front doors then you fundamentally redefine their connectivity paradigm, evolving from an era of bandwidth scarcity to one of abundance. As the Internet's backbone is all fiber, anything with lesser capacity will be a bottleneck. So let's acknowledge that the next-generation of the Internet means extending the power of fiber optics to every house.
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Comments
Recently read that a fiber optic cable just wider than a pencil could handle all the communications traffic in the world right now. So, the point is, if you pulled one fiber optic cable to each home/premise, you'd solve the capacity problem for many, many years to come. I don't hear many suggesting that DSL or cable can do the same.
It is not enough to simply say fiber has more bandwidth so that is what should be pulled. If that argument made sense, then why not pull 2, or 5 or 100 optical fibers to every home?
The answer surely is because to do so may not be cost effective. Equally, it may not be cost effective to pull fiber to every home.
The reality is that it is not easy to know what is best. Verizon has taken a bet that fiber-to-the-premise will be financial. AT&T largely thinks not, or at least not yet. At the same time, it seems plausible that DOCSIS 3.0 will make capable capacity that few people currently could use (though that may no longer hold with the passage of enough time).
So let's acknowledge what we do not know and take that into account when we offer advice as to how someone should spend their money, or, closer to home, how the government should spend ours.